# modification of parser.y

Berry Kercheval (kerch@parc.xerox.com)
Sat, 22 Jun 1996 22:48:13 PDT

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    >>>H. Peter Anvin said:
     > For information on how to use yacc I recommend "Lex and Yacc" by
     > Levine, Mason & Brown, published by O'Reilly and Associates.  The
     > venerable "dragon book" has a more in-depth discussion of the LALR
     > parsing techique.

    Further, you may wish to look at the Gnu version of Yacc, 'Bison', which also
    comes with some reasonably decent documentation.

    YACC means "Yet Another Compiler-Compiler".  In the late 70's and early 80's
    there were a lot of programs for writing program translators (i.e.
    "compiler-compilers") and this was thought to be a cute name.

    Bison is the Gnu version of a Yak.  Um, or Yacc.  Or something.  One of those
    shaggy ungulates anyway.

    I should perhaps mention that modifying yacc grammars (and debugging them!) is
    moderately wizardly, and not for the fainthearted.  use RCS and back up
    working copies of everything before you start and as often as you can, so when
    you screw up (and you will, I always do...) you can recover.

      --berry

    Berry Kercheval :: kerch@parc.xerox.com :: Xerox Palo Alto Research Center